A Corpus-based Critical Analysis of American Foreign Policies on China

Modality reflects the speaker's position, attitude or evaluation of the situation. This study collected American foreign policy discourse on China human rights to create two small corpora. Three types of modality are compared to reveal the hidden ideology behind political discourse. It is found that: (1) the proportion of modalities in Obama's corpora is larger than that in Trump's; (2) epistemic accounts for the largest, while volitional accounts for the smallest; (3) three types of modalities contribute to the realization of different communicative purposes in American human rights diplomacy to China.